


a bookend to the weirdest of weeks

by haloud



Series: open up my eager eyes [4]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Emotional Sex, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Riding, but as in the other fics in this series mylex is a fully reciprocated triangle, not tagging malex this time bc they don't interact all that much in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 04:21:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18909445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: On the anniversary of his father’s death, Kyle wakes up with an alien at his back and a Manes sleeping six inches away.





	a bookend to the weirdest of weeks

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from fear and trembling by gang of youths
> 
> this fic is not for redistribution without my express permission.

On the anniversary of his father’s death, Kyle wakes up with an alien at his back and a Manes sleeping six inches away. In the delicate early-morning light, it could be any other day. Kyle is usually up first; he shimmies out of bed and lets Michael roll into the warm spot he leaves behind. He’d slouch into the kitchen and smack the coffeemaker awake before he even truly wakes up himself and down a cup or two black and scalding before the aroma lures Alex out of bed. The two of them would drift in companionable silence, sometimes leaning against each other, sometimes not, while Alex caffeinates himself and Kyle digs around for breakfast. Michael usually skips breakfast and goes straight to his lab, so Alex—or Kyle on his days off—will bring him something before heading out for the day. It’s a sweet routine, painfully normal, so blissfully domestic it feels like it belongs to someone else’s life. But it’s real, and it’s theirs.

But this isn’t any other day.

After all the revelations of the past months, all the shattering and rebuilding his world has undergone, Kyle had been trying even harder than usual to forget this day was looming on the horizon. Hadn’t know how the grief, for all it fades and swells throughout the year, would hit him new now that he’s got two Jim Valentis living side by side in his mind to grieve—for all that it seems he never actually knew either of them.

It turns out the grief comes on the same as always after all. Like he’s been treading water for hours and his muscles are about to give out. Like he’s been running a marathon with a hundred pounds strapped to his back. It’s something he lives with, that builds within him, and today is just the day he allows himself to let go.

He stares up at the ceiling, breathes in for five, and breathes out for ten. Remembers lying in bed pretending to be asleep on Christmas mornings so his dad would sneak in, lift him carefully up, then throw him back down while Kyle cackled with laughter. The kitchen would smell like cinnamon hot chocolate; he’d lay on his back beneath the tree in a nest of discarded paper and ribbons and cross his eyes so the world melted into a glittering rainbow blur. It was so easy to make the world magical back then.

Alex’s breathing shifts and, careful and quiet, he turns on his side to look at Kyle. When he sees Kyle looking back at him, a hesitant smile tugs at his lips. “Hey,” he whispers, and he reaches out to cup Kyle’s jaw.

“Hey,” Kyle mouths back. Silence follows, the only sound the gentle rasp of Alex’s thumb against Kyle’s stubbled cheek. Kyle touches that hand and stills it, presses it fully to his face, leans into that hot, steady touch.

In Alex’s dark eyes, Kyle sees the little boys they used to be, running around the Manes’s backyard, all skinned knees and dirty clothes, hiding under the deck. Kyle’s dad came out of the house just as the sky started fading lavender, periwinkle, and gray, softening all the edges of the world. He stood facing away from the house with his fists on his hips declaring in his deep, booming voice: ‘Well, I guess the coyotes ate well tonight! No little ones left out here, that’s for sure!’ And Alex and Kyle held their hands over each other’s mouths but their giggling gave them away anyway. Dad chased them out and around the yard with jets of water from the garden hose until they laughed and ran themselves to exhaustion; then he scooped them both up, one on each shoulder, and dumped them into the backseat of his car—wet, dirty and all—and brought them both home for a sleepover and marshmallows toasted over the living room fire.

Kyle also remembers the shuttered disappointment on his father’s face when he came home from prom with a bruise on his cheekbone and blood on his collar.

His hand drops back to the bed limp and cold. He’s too full up today; there’s no room left in him for the space Alex’s forgiveness deserves. Even now, no anger crosses his perfect face. He just sits up, stretches, and starts preparing for the day.

“Take all the time you need,” he says. “If you’re not up, I’ll bring you some coffee when it’s ready,” and he kisses Kyle on the forehead then the lips before leveraging himself off the bed.

As one might imagine, it’s a morning for melancholies. How many times has Michael lured Kyle, Alex, or both of them into lazy mornings with his hot hands or spread thighs or parted, waiting pink mouth? The birds sing outside the same; the same sun creeps through the curtains and has him seeing scarlet through his eyelids. But Kyle lays still with his arm thrown over his eyes and tries to block out the sounds of Alex moving around in the kitchen. God let him get out of bed before Alex brings him breakfast in it like he deserves being waited on. God let him escape from the feverishly warm wash of Michael snuggling against his side before he blinks those sunlight eyes like—

He doesn’t want Michael to have to look at him. Not today.

Time to get up, Valenti. Get up.

Kyle scrubs his hand over his face. Michael’s arm tightens around him like he can sense Kyle trying to slide out from under him and wants to keep him close. He’s the most tactile lover Kyle has ever had, sprawled out and clinging in turns, always taking up space, always making room for everyone else beside him. During sex, he’s so sensitive and starved it sometimes hurts to watch. In his sleep, he’s clingier than an octopus. Kyle usually doesn’t like to leave him.

But today…

They’ve never talked about it. About Caulfield. About the Valentis’ part in the horrors there. With Jesse Manes looming so large in all their lives, the old sheriff who suddenly got sick just fades into the background. But Kyle knows. He feels it in his bones, that legacy. It dogs his steps. It haunts him at night. Once a week, he wakes choking from dreams where Michael slams his shattered hand against a locked quarantine door and screams at him and Alex to go. Dreams where it was Kyle who put him in there, and the door slammed shut behind him. Dreams where he’s surrounded by grimy hospital walls, and it’s Michael sliced open on his table, and all he can hear over the flatlining in his ears is _I don’t need an airman, I need a Valenti…_

Kyle makes it to the bathroom before his stomach rebels, but it’s a close thing.

He meets Alex in the kitchen with mouthwash still burning at the back of his throat.

“You…look terrible.” Alex pours him a mug of coffee, adds just a little cream and sugar, and slips it directly into Kyle’s hands. Their hands curl together around the mug, and Alex leans in to kiss him lightly. “Do you have any plans for today?”

“No.” Kyle’s voice catches on that single syllable, and he clears his throat. “Have dinner with my mom. Other than that, she, uh, prefers to treat this like any other day.”

Alex rests his forehead in the crook of Kyle’s neck and kisses him there, right where the slope of his shoulder begins. He says, “Okay. Well, I have the day off, and Michael said he could make himself available too, so…we’re here, for whatever you need, even if it’s just silence and space.”

Every muscle in Kyle’s body freezes and locks. Alex stiffens too when he feels it, pulling back just enough to look Kyle in the eye.

“How much does Michael know?” Kyle asks through numb lips. Alex looks him up and down, his eyes flicking across Kyle’s features like he’s a problem that needs solving.

“Not…much, I guess. Just that today is the anniversary of your father’s death. He never had any reason to be close to Jim, so he wouldn’t know the date already, and I thought he should know you might need space today. What else is there to know?”

Kyle drops into a chair at the kitchen table and buries his face in his hands. When? When did Alex tell him; how did Kyle not notice? How long has Michael been going to bed with them, knowing how deeply Kyle still mourns one of the men who—who—

“Kyle, what’s wrong? Talk to me, please.”

“I didn’t want him to know.”

“What? Kyle, he cares about you, he—”

Kyle shakes his head in wordless denial. He’d thought about leaving for the day. Making his excuses. Taking his mom somewhere nice, maybe. But she wouldn’t have wanted that, and Kyle would have no idea how to explain, and…in the end Kyle hadn’t had the energy even to take himself away, just for a little while, just so he could work his shit out. So he stayed, like a coward.

And it would be one thing—it would be shameful enough already—if Alex was the only one to witness this. Alex at least understands the burden of this legacy—understands it even better than Kyle. But Michael? How can he even look Michael in the eye after this?

Caulfield shattered Michael. Broke him in ways that can never be repaired. He’s done a lot of healing over the past months; he’s stitched himself back up in new patterns, ones that work with the pieces he’s got left. But when those seams come unraveled and Kyle gets a peek at the emptiness he’s covering up, he…

Kyle would rather die than pull on those strings. Ever.

But here he is.

Jim Valenti made family breakfasts at this kitchen table. He was a terrible cook, something Kyle never really recognized until that one time he got to taste Arturo Ortecho’s churro pancakes. But those Saturday mornings with his dad fumbling around in the kitchen are some of Kyle’s earliest memories.

His parents also fought at this kitchen table. In screaming whispers, late at night when they thought Kyle was asleep. Kyle knows now that they were probably fighting over his dad’s affairs. That realization falls to Kyle’s stomach to join the other stones settled there.

A hand wraps gently around Kyle’s wrist to pull his hand away from his face.

“Look at me,” Alex says, his voice both firm and gentle and leaving no room for Kyle to disobey. Those dark eyes pull him in, like they always do. “Kyle, you don’t have to be ashamed for grieving your father. Remember what I told you. He was a good man. Whatever else he was—whatever else he did—he was _your father_ to you. That’s what you’re grieving. Not some other, monstrous version of the man you never met. You never knew that man. It’s not fair to yourself to take on the blame for the things he did.”

“You told me those things _before_ Caulfield. Before we saw that _place,_ the things that were done there.” Kyle spits out the words. His stomach rolls with nausea for the second time.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” Alex pulls Kyle forward to rest against his chest, in the circle of his arms. Kyle wants to pull away, but it’s so much easier to breathe there. “But we can’t turn back time. We can’t fix it. All we can do is be better than they were. And pushing Michael away out of guilt isn’t going to make things any better.”

Kyle shakes his head again, burrowing into Alex.

“I mean it. He doesn’t blame you—us—not really. There are moments when it hits him, but…I think we all have that. He knows you’re a good man. Trust me. Talk to him.”

“I can’t,” Kyle croaks. God, he’s done so much crying since he learned aliens were real. A little thing like getting weepy feels less monumental when your scale of reality has been busted open that exponentially.

“You can. You have to.” Alex runs his fingers over Kyle’s scalp in soothing strokes. “I’ll see if he’s awake. I’m not going to let this fester, Kyle. Today is hard enough. Our lives are hard enough. You don’t have to feel this way.”

And Alex steps away with a parting kiss to Kyle’s temple. He goes back into the bedroom, taking all warmth in the house with him. Kyle hunches around his now-lukewarm coffee, just trying to hold off the chill in his bones.

Two quiet voices hover at the edge of Kyle’s hearing. Michael must have already been awake. How much might he have heard? Kyle stands up, but even taking a step feels like moving through molasses.

“Hey, Doc, get in here,” Michael calls. His voice is still rough with sleep, that languid drawl he has when he’s teasing, or when he wakes up wanting to be held down. A flush of heat raises goosebumps all over Kyle’s skin, but he still can’t make himself move. Until, that is, Alex appears in the doorway with his hand outstretched and beckoning, a little smile on his face.

“Don’t keep him waiting,” Alex says. “I told you it will be okay.”

Forcing every motion, every lift and fall of every step, it feels like it takes hours just to make it the few feet of the hall. When he gets close enough, Alex grabs his shoulders and guides him forward to see—

Michael, naked and sprawled out on the twisted sheets,  watching them through slitted eyes, one hand slowly stroking himself, the other working further back between his legs.

“Wh—” Kyle splutters, the sight and the arousal it floods through him completely at odds with the dam of dread inside his chest.

“Use your words, Michael,” Alex says, but he’s amused, close to laughter.

“Can’t help it. I woke up like this, with no one waiting around to help me out. So I’ve just been getting ready to take care of things myself…”

A drawer to Kyle’s right opens up, and Kyle, blushing from his neck all the way to the tips of his ears, jumps and slams it shut before Michael can get anything out of it.

Turns out you can get used to telekinesis being a part of your life pretty quickly. Dildos floating across the room, on the other hand, take a little more time to accept.

“Get over here, Valenti,” Michael says. “Alex tells me there are some things you need taken off your mind.”

An invisible hand shoves him in the back, pushing him towards the bed until he’s standing at the foot of it, between Michael’s spread legs.

“Michael, I—” Kyle says. He doesn’t have the right words. Doesn’t even know where to begin. The invisible hand gives him another shove, until he’s on all fours above Michael’s prone body. Michael hooks an arm around his shoulders and pulls him down for a filthy, consuming kiss.

“It’s okay. Kyle.” Michael says. There’s something, _something_ burning in those eyes. It sets Kyle’s muscles to shaking. It’s too much for today. It’s too much for the morning. It’s so much more than Kyle thinks he deserves. Alex moves to sit at the head of the bed, close enough to stroke Michael’s curls and carefully watch Kyle’s face for any hint of hesitation, and that’s too much too.

This has, historically, been the kind of day when Kyle runs away and hides. Buries himself in work, like chasing the things that made his father proud of him could bring him back. He doesn’t know how to handle affection breaking him open and pulling him into the light.

“It’s okay,” Michael repeats. “I don’t know what else to say. I think if I talk too much right now it’s going to get twisted. That maybe you won’t believe me. Let me show you.” Using his legs and the arm still around Kyle’s shoulders, he twists them until Kyle is the one pressed back against the sheets, and Michael is hovering over him.

“Let me show you,” he says, “I want you.” His rough-palmed hand scrapes the line of hair on Kyle’s stomach and dips past the waistband of his shorts to rub his swelling cock to full mast.

“Are you sure?” Kyle finally finds his voice. It comes out desperate, yearning. Can he still want this? With the specter of the past between them?

“You know me. I like to start the day off right.” Michael wiggles forward. His cock bobs against his stomach. Kyle licks his lips.

He leans forward. “We can talk tomorrow,” he rasps directly into Kyle’s ear. “We can talk when the day’s less shit. Let yourself have this. Make me feel good, Doc. It’ll make you feel good too.”

“Fuck!” Kyle shouts, hips jerking at the heat and tightness of the head of his cock slipping into Michael. His sudden movement forces a couple more inches in all at once, and Michael reacts with a shout of his own and a triumphant, feral grin. He sinks down quickly, already stretched and slicked, like he’s been getting ready ever since Kyle crawled out of bed feeling like nothing would ever be right again.

But this is right. This is easy. Always has been, no matter how new this thing still is. The rhythm of their bodies—the neediness in them both. It’s so goddamn _right_ Kyle has to grit his teeth against the rush of his emotions.

Michael leans back, his core flexing, strong thighs gripping Kyle’s hips, body tightening scorching-hot around Kyle’s cock until Michael hits the angle he was looking for and lets out a grinning, shuddery gasp. Kyle reacts on instinct, reaching out his arm to support Michael’s lower back as he starts to roll his hips. Matching his rhythm, Kyle fucks him steady, easy, and Michael tips his head and lets every delicious grunt and moan and sigh fall from his lips and into the open air between them. Each and every one lights up Kyle’s nerves like the brush of his fingertips and he pants, open-mouth, trying with all his strength to hold on to control.

Desperation builds in him like a bomb, in the pumping of his hips, in the trembling muscles of his arms trying to keep them both upright. There’s not enough of him, not nearly enough to curl up around Michael Guerin and keep him grounded, keep him intact, keep _him._

“Guerin,” he gasps, in ecstasy, in horror at the wet gash of his own voice, and he tumbles forward to rest his forehead against Michael’s solar plexus, burrowing closer, just trying to crawl inside him. Michael’s hips still, and Kyle clings on to him with both arms now, clutching their bodies together.

“Doc?” Michael rasps out the question, leaning sweetly into Kyle’s embrace.

“Kyle,” Alex’s voice trails off into soothing murmurs, and he cards his fingers through Kyle’s hair before grabbing his jaw firmly and tilting his head for a kiss. “You’re okay,” he whispers against Kyle’s lips, “It’s okay. We’re here. There’s nowhere you need to be but here. Just let Michael do all the work, baby, let him give you this.”

Michael moans in agreement, a warm and needy sound. He starts rolling his hips again, just the slightest suggestion of movement to test if Kyle’s still in the mood. Kyle digs his nails into that velvety skin and drags them down. He nods permission against the phantom throb of Michael’s pulse.

“Feels good,” Michael says, “love it when you scratch me, when you bite.” He arches his back. “Alex, Alex, God, his cock is perfect, feels so good, _Kyle—”_

“Hear that?” Alex strokes Kyle’s cheekbones with the pads of his thumbs. “Feel him working around you? Feel how good you’re making him feel? Let it feel good, Kyle. It’s okay. Let go.”

 _Let go._ Those two words, that permission, that benediction, wash through Kyle, fill up his lungs.

And let go he does. He fixes his teeth into the curve of Michael’s shoulder, fastens his fingertips into the wings of Michael’s hips, and _takes._ Michael throws his head back and rides it out with abandon, matching him for every thrust and buck with sweat making his curls go rich and dark and that cowboy grin lighting his face up with pleasure. And Alex stays steady, a fixed point, a north star, grounding them and holding them and completing them and—

Kyle comes with the tang of blood in his mouth and the splash of Michael’s own release against his stomach.

In the afterglow, Kyle waits in silence for the grief, the fear, the guilt. For the endorphins to wash out of him and leave the morning’s heavy numbness in its wake. But it doesn’t come. Face to face with his lovers, everything is so much clearer.

Michael may never be able to talk about Caulfield. It’s a pain too great, a loss too horrifying to even fathom, and the Manes and the Valentis are tied inextricably to that pain. But Kyle’s grief isn’t for the man who did those things, and even if he’s grieving a fiction…the fact is that Jim Valenti is dead. Kyle will never get the answers he needs to reconcile the two Jim Valentis in his mind, so he just has to live with them both fighting for space.

Kyle buries his face in Michael’s damp curls and just breathes him in. Alex rests his cheek between Kyle’s shoulder blades and sighs against the rhythm of his heartbeat.  There are things that can never be made right. All anyone can do is grip tight in the wake of destruction; hold on to each other; hold on to their _humanity._

And part of humanity is grief. Even for people who, in the end, might not deserve it.

“I can go get us booze if you wanna get wasted until this day is over,” Michael says, breaking the silence, and Kyle heaves out a huff of breathless laughter.

“Anything you need,” Alex adds. “Ice cream, a foot massage…”

“Hey, you never offer _me_ a foot massage.”

“That’s because you’re so ticklish you’d probably kick me in the gut, Guerin.”

“Nuance.”

Kyle laughs for real this time, and he sits up, kissing first Michael then twisting to kiss Alex long and deep.

“Yeah, yeah, that. That sounds great. Let’s make a night of it. A new tradition.”

He slides off the bed. His feet hit the floor of his father’s cabin, and this time it doesn’t even hurt. He stands for a moment, scraping his toes against the grain of the old wood. Sense memory stirs the soles of his feet, of running down these halls as a child, of sneaking down these halls to go drink with his buddies out in the desert. His family came to this cabin less and less as the years went by, and Kyle wonders what other memories the wood might be able to tell. The sound of his father’s laughter; women’s voices. Mrs. Ortecho. Rosa. Kyle lets the emotions flow through him one after another—nostalgia, then grief, then resentment, then just deep, thudding sadness of the lies hiding in the dark corners of all his memories.

But he can hear Alex and Michael moving behind him, around him, into the next room. Alex, who understands him so deep down, so intimately, who centers him, who settles him, who came back into his life with unshakeable strength, flowed into every old crevice, and made this old shadowed monument to a dead man back into a home. Michael, who represents part of a future Kyle _never_ thought would be his; Michael, with his genius and his anger and his constant buzzing motion and all the possibilities spinning on his fingertips—possibilities he’s somehow decided to share with Kyle, somehow deemed him worthy despite all that bad blood both between them and in Kyle’s veins.

So it’s okay to take this day. It’s okay to take this day for his mother, stoic and loyal and stronger than steel, who loved her husband in spite of him, in spite of herself. It’s okay to take this day for Rosa Ortecho and all her tangled threads, who died loved by two fathers, the sister he never got to have. It’s okay to take this day for Alex, who needed a man like Jim Valenti, and deserved better still. It’s okay to take this day for _himself._ To soak in his grief. To marvel in his memories. To rebreak, and to heal.

The past, the present, and the future—they’ll all still be there tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> this one was way more emotional so I hope you guys weren't turned off (heh) by the change in tone.
> 
> caulfield is kind of the elephant in the room whenever these three characters are together, so i wanted to address it. but a big, lay-it-all-out talk doesn't really feel...right for the kind of people michael and kyle are, at least not in my interpretation. so they get to fuck it out instead.
> 
> (don't worry i'm sure alex will make them talk about it later)
> 
> @ twitter: haloudd  
> @ discord: haloud  
> @ tumblr: cosmicsolipsism


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